Impending Election(s), Food Safety (or Not) & More
Featuring an interview with Bolts Magazine's Daniel Nichanian!
Hello friends,
It’s a bittersweet moment – the last of our election-related newsletters! The (temporary) end to obsessive thinking about the impending election(s)! When you hear from us next, the country will have a bunch of new elected officials, including a host of new prosecutors, judges, and sheriffs – which brings us to today’s interview with the brilliant Daniel Nichanian, the founder and editor-in-chief of Bolts Magazine and certified criminal-justice election expert extraordinaire.
And, to start sloooowly moving away from election coverage, we’ve also got some ideas for how to report on food safety (shout-out to Boar’s Head and McDonald’s), which should definitely be part of the public safety beat. After all, it’s pretty important to be able to trust that the food we’re buying won’t make us sick or kill us.
Now, onto our conversation with Daniel!
Q: Bolts has this excellent new resource tracking prosecutor and sheriff races across the country. How did you choose which races to focus on?
A: As soon as an election cycle starts, we put together a list of every DA election and every sheriff election in the country. Then we have an opportunity to funnel down to the more interesting races, because we know that there is this vast audience of people deeply interested in understanding what's going on in criminal justice policy and politics, but unsure of how to navigate the fact that the most important decisions are made across this broken-up landscape of thousands of counties. Unfortunately, at the local level a lot of DA and sheriff races are not even contested. Typically, there’s just an incumbent. So we identify the races (within the already quite small universe of contested races) where there are interesting contrasts in what people want to do with the office. We identify races with scandals, controversies, accountability issues, and so on. We want people around the country who care about criminal justice policy and other issues to know about the most interesting or relevant races, because there’s only so much attention people have, especially in the final weeks before elections.
Q: Speaking of this phenomenon, have you noticed any differences in the number of prosecutor/sheriff races where candidates are running unopposed? Are there fewer uncontested races today than there were 4 years ago?
A: I was doing similar work at The Appeal in 2020, tracking races in the same counties that are on the ballot again this fall, and my impression is that there's been no improvement in terms of the number of contested races. If anything, depending on the state, it’s worse. In Wisconsin, for example, this is a state that saw a lot of protests in 2020, and since the last filing deadline there’s been a lot more attention to policing, prosecution, and more opposition from the right to criminal justice reform in the state. But despite that it’s still rare for there to be a contested election. Same in Ohio. There’s still a disconnect between people who care about and follow these issues and the actual races.
Q: It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of individual races. Can you tell us about some broad trends you’re seeing this election cycle?
A: I think we saw more unexpected candidates talking about criminal justice reform in 2020 than we see today, and I think in a number of places reformers came actually quite close to winning a prosecutor's office in 2020, but ultimately fell short. In my own work, I've come across fewer candidates who are speaking the language of reform on the campaign trail this year, whereas in 2020 I was surprised once I dove into some counties I hadn't heard much about. There’s not the same push for attention around the volume of incarceration. Again, in 2020 and 2022, we saw more unexpected candidates aligned with a reform perspective in big races. Right now, in California, there's anti-reform candidates or forces that are very strong, and they might pull off two big wins in Oakland and LA. But that's not necessarily something that’s happening in other places.
We saw an anti-reform DA lose in Albany, New York. A big county in Colorado is going to possibly elect its first reform DA. Austin's reform-minded DA won his primary. So we always have to look at the unique context of the state: the debates happening there, the local policies, the conversations that are dictating who is willing to defend an incumbent or a challenger.
Q: Mass incarceration is…massive. So many people are touched by the criminal justice system in some way in this country. Do you see that reality playing a role in elections?
A: Yes! Proximity to incarceration and the system absolutely plays a role. A specific example: we ran this geographic analysis of Pittsburgh's DA election a year ago, in Allegheny County. Our reporter went there and talked to folks, and the story overlayed the map of incarceration in the county and the map of how voters voted in past elections – the areas where incarceration was highest had people who had repeatedly voted against the incumbent DA there, and vice versa.
Q: Can you talk to us a bit about judicial races?
A: If people care about criminal justice, having the big view and looking at judicial races, from state Supreme Courts to local judges is really important. Places like Michigan, Ohio and Montana come to mind as states where the balance of power on the supreme court could shift, and this is very important for criminal justice policy: Michigan's supreme court last year, for instance, issued a series of decisions expanding protections for defendants based on their interpretation of what is cruel or unusual. We're also seeing a continued push this year by some people with public defense experience to make it on the bench. Maybe the most interesting race I covered this year was the Massachusetts election in which a public defender won a heated race to make it on the board that reviews judicial appointments: That's what I mean by the big view!
Q: What do you wish journalists covering these issues did or talked about more?
A: I always like to see articles that are able to connect the dots between practices and policies implemented by prosecutors and other officials and the impacts they’re having in a way that can actually be understood. A story we did at Bolts this year that I thought was very helpful – while it may not have been our biggest story – was after there was a change in office in Tampa, Florida. DeSantis removed the Democratic prosecutor there, and we ran a story on just one of the reforms that the new Republican prosecutor immediately – literally within days – rolled back. It was the policy to not charge people when they're stopped while biking, because evidence showed that Black people were a lot more likely to be stopped while biking in Tampa. Being able to connect that official change of policy and then the immediate effect that has on people is so important. County to county there can be really big differences in how people are experiencing the criminal legal system.
Also, I think we see a lot of stories about rollbacks to reforms or backlash to reforms. We’ve had a lot of coverage over the years of why the backlash is happening, but when a reform candidate wins, in Austin or Philly in 2017 and 2021, it’s good to see coverage that’s like, ‘what is driving the vote for these people?’ What are people’s frustrations with the status quo, what are people’s experiences with knowing people who have been incarcerated or otherwise touched by the criminal legal system, how is that shaping their understanding of the system? There's such a ready story that people know how to tell about backlash, and these can be important stories to report, but there are other types of stories and trends to highlight and point to as well.
More resources from Daniel:
The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November
Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2024?
More:
Food Safety (Or Not)
Why We’re Thinking About It
There have been a few notable and scary instances of food making people sick and even killing people recently. You probably heard about the Boar’s Head fiasco, where listeria contamination from one plant in Virginia resulted in 10 deaths and scores of illnesses across the country. Even more recently, McDonald’s was serving up e.coli in their quarter pounders. There has been a slight increase in the number of food recalls by the FDA (according to this Vox piece by Ellen Ioanes and Li Zhou as well as this Axios reporting by Kelly Tyko) over the last year, although in general the number is actually lower than it was in 2018-2020.
Opportunities for Reporting
CBS news found a clear trend of negligence at a Boar’s Head facility in Virginia where the deadly listeria outbreak originated. Thanks to their FOIAs, they also found that the plant was, in technical terms, absolutely disgusting. If you want to get more into the details, they’ve made the records they got public here. (Content warning: contains the phrase “meat overspray on the walls”, which we had been blessedly shielded from hearing up until this point in our lives.) The records CBS received showed that the Virginia plant had been logged as “noncompliant” by government investigators nearly 70 times. These are replicable record requests. OSHA is a great place to start looking for bad actors. Ditto the FDA. The enforcement reports section is a trove.
A lot of the recent FDA recalls have to do with undeclared allergens. This is particularly dangerous for kids, who have more food allergies than adults – 1 in 13 American kids has a food allergy of some sort, roughly 2 kids per classroom, according to PIRG. Look for trends – are there companies with a history of repeated violations? Is there cross-contamination in facilities caused by lax oversight? The Food Allergy Research and Resource Program in Nebraska has a ton of resources.
Do some records requests (à la CBS) to find out if food production facilities have been found to be in noncompliance with federal regulations. Talk to former (or even current, if they’re down) employees.
You can also think beyond food. Some of the most dangerous professions have their workers outside, sometimes in pretty remote places (think fishing, logging, roofing – remember that New York Times piece about child roofers?! – and agricultural work). Working outside brings in new dangers in a few ways – for one, you’re at the mercy of the elements, including dangerous heat, cold, and storms; also, working outside means a vast, spread-out workplace that doesn’t lend itself easily to pop-in investigations or oversight.
Another angle might be thinking through how workers in these industries will be kept safe in the event of climate-related chaos. We’ve talked about it before, but workers at a plastics plant in Tennessee (now under state investigation) were told to stay at their job despite impending Hurricane Helene. Request evacuation plans and other contingencies in the event of disasters.
Good Stuff We’ve Read This Week:
More bleak death penalty news: Sam Levin reports for The Guardian on South Carolina’s impending execution of Richard Moore, in what is a pretty unusual case. Moore – a Black man – was convicted by an (intentionally) all-white jury, and the crime itself is…perhaps not a crime. He entered a convenience store unarmed, the clerk pulled a gun on him, and a scuffle ensued, resulting in both men being shot (the clerk fatally). Moore was then charged and sentenced to death.
Here’s another great edition of The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series – this time detailing the underground economy in solitary confinement in a New York prison, with people trading precious commodities like stamps and soap through rather ingenious methods, like tying items onto “fishing” lines crafted from ripped clothes/sheets and tossing them from cell to cell.
For Bolts, Lauren Gill reports on the struggle to get formerly incarcerated New Mexicans re-enfranchised in time to vote in next week’s election.
For Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE, and KFF News, Andy Miller and Renuka Rayasam report on the long-term health impacts for kids living with their families in extended-stay hotels as a last defense against living on the street or bouncing from shelter to shelter.
And last but not least! A few days ago, Gallup came out with their annual polling on Americans’ assessments of crime and safety - the overall perceptions of crime have improved, with the percentage saying national crime has increased over the past year falling by a big old 13 points, to 64%. This is big and there’s a lot to say about it, but we’ll leave that for the next newsletter!